A small step for this mod...

[Nevets_]

You wouldn't really need to worry about building earth units on the moon if you have terrain damage set to a ludicrously high number and all the moon units have a 'space suit' promotion that reduces it to 10% or something. If you gave the moon terrain a big defensive malus like -75%, and had the spacesuit promotion give you a +75% defense bonus then even Earth units stuck inside cities/forts would be useless for defense.

Not sure if this is possible, but for the initial colonization it would be neat if the constructor ships built on Earth had a series of 'target destination' buttons that corresponded to unique terrain features on the moon, and whichever one you choose would consume the constructor ship and spawn a fort on the unique terrain. Then supply ships could be 're-based' to the fort. It makes sense to me that in the early days of lunar colonization there would be a shortlist of desirable landing sites and after those were all claimed further colonization would only occur when the initial lunar bases had developed enough to launch their own efforts.

For routes I can only see two reasonable options:
1. There would be just one kind of road: lunar regolith that has been leveled and packed down. There isn't any point in paving a long stretch with concrete when it's in no danger of washing away from rain and meteorite impacts would require constant minor repairs anyway. And lunar dust packs extremely well, without any erosion it's all sharp edges that tend to lock together when compressed.
2. Maglev elevated trains would be extremely effective on the moon. With the low gravity and no atmosphere they wouldn't need much power at all to stay floating and could accelerate to ludicrous speeds. With the rails elevated off the ground there wouldn't be much terraforming work involved and the small cross section would make meteorite damage much less likely.

 

[Faustmouse]

1.) I don't mind earth units on the moon in particular. Regular firearms would be completely useless though.
Having a unit on a non-sheltered plot on the moon shouldn't really be possible. I was thinking of 100% terrain damage so that each unit (unless robotic) has to end it's turn inside a "fort" or a city. After all, turns are still several months long and you only have limited air supply etc.

2.) The danger with only a few landing sites is that one civ takes them all. Also it's quite artificial. The way I made the buildings is that a colony is very expensive; and unless you have the right resources (at least one of the three metals - Aluminium, Titanium or Iron - and He3 in vicinity. Later when the map coordinates are fixed I want to have the Water Extractor only be buildable near the poles; so the first cities on the moon HAVE to be near the poles and only later you can build water piplines that would allow cities anywhere else; this would definetly limit the good city sites there in a "natural" way

3.) Yes! I was thinking excactly the same about routes.
I'm not sure if you can limit types of routes to certain terrains - I'm not that far in my developement either :/

 

[Toffer90]

An at least plausible way to define what units that are allowed on the moon would be to add a new unitcombat type given to all Earth units called UNITCOMBAT_EARTH/TERRA/TELLUS with a trainrequirement tag that checks for something specific to the Earth, an autobuild perhaps.

Alternatively there might be a way in the dll to automatically exclude all units except those with a UNITCOMBAT_MOON/LUNA/LUNAR from being built on the off-planet map cities.

 

[Nevets_]

Once regular trade routes are established, it would be nice to be able to give some existing Earth units a 'retrofit' promotion that would reduce their strength but allow them to function on the moon like native units do, so regular infantry are issued with space suits, vehicles are made air tight, etc. and then shipped to the moon through an 'air-lift' style system.

And modern firearms work perfectly well (maybe even better due to lack of air resistance) in a vacuum. Modern smokeless powder contains it's own oxidizer so it doesn't require atmospheric oxygen to function. The same is true for rocket motors and I'll bet the charges for cannons. By mixing the oxidizer & fuel into the same package you can provide just enough of each & they react much faster, giving you alot less wasted energy from uncombusted fuel (smoke) or slowly combusting fuel that is still burning after the projectile has left the barrel so it no longer contributes any energy to it.

Missiles that rely on stabilizing or directional fins wouldn't work, but ones that solely use vectored exhausts would.

 

[Faustmouse]

Toffer you are right....

This is all "later". Good ideas though, but I'm currently struggling with the basics

A sure.... You know, what I don't like about combat on the moon is that it will possibly destroy the whole city pretty easily. Also, if two nations were fighting about a colony site, wouldn't it just make much more sense to fight on earth? Getting mass to the moon is so darn expensive that it's unlikely that you would bring your weapons there.
You could build your military on the moon but that would consume a huge amount of the colonies resources.

 

[Nevets_]

Isolated combat on the Moon could occur if it were limited to a proxy war in which the semi-autonomous governments on the Moon were fighting each other while being supplied (usually covertly) by their parent nations on Earth, who claim to have no part in the conflict. This wouldn't work in the game engine, though, unless anything sent to the Moon became the property of your colonial vassal civ, and that civ could declare war on another colonial vassal civ without bringing either parent civ into the war.

And any war between the Earth & Moon would be really nasty, too. Lunar bases are incredibly vulnerable to ICBMS (even ones with conventional payloads), obviously, but the Earth is equally vulnerable. A big hunk of rock, fused into an aerodynamic shape and shot off the Moon with a relatively small rocket or a maglev sled would fall towards the Earth fast enough to cause an impact equivalent to a small nuke.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

If I remember correctly, you only get the Urban units if you loose access to resources.

There is currently no Terrain tags on the Route definition nor the Build definition. There are Feature tags on the Build definition which allow us to say that a route can't be built on a terrain feature. having such a thing would help with the sea tunnels.

 

[Faustmouse]

But how long do you think will it take until lunar colonies are truely independend?

Anyways, yes, I think battles on the moon could be realistic. But for now I'd rather focus on the civil stuff first Once this is done and playable I'm pretty sure fitting in military stuff will be easier

I also remember the Urban units that way. But the Atlatlist then should definetly upgrade into them. And any unit before them as well.
Too bad with the routes... But at first you can only build normal Roads there anyways, and they could as well be made out of Lunar dust.
And after that we might reach a point where Maglevs are already buildable and you have the resources for them, so skipping Railroads (which require Coal or Oil IIRC)

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

The way we do in between land and sea on Earth is by restricting improvements that the units can build. Workers build LAND domain stuff because that is the only thing defined to them. Same for work boats and SEA domain stuff. It is not the domain but what the units are defined to build. Therefore the solution is

1) restrict where the Earth worker units can go. IE make off planet terrains impassible.

2) have new workers that are restricted to the Lunar terrain and have the correct builds.

This may be a better way to go as eventually, some time after Constructor Ships we would want a unit that can go anywhere and do anything.

edit

Lunar Worker is defined to only build roads and meglev routes and can only build the lunar other improvements. They can move on lunar terrain while all the Earth workers are modified to have those terrains as impassible.

 

[Faustmouse]

Good idea! I intented to have an early unit that can only build roads on the moon. Probably it's easier to limit the methods of how to get to the moon. I wanted to have missions on only a few units that put the unit directly onto the moon, like the paradrop mission.

 

[Dancing Hoskuld]

I wanted to have missions on only a few units that put the unit directly onto the moon, like the paradrop mission.

That is exactly how I envisaged early space travel. Only some units have missions that allow them to move from one to another. These missions would probably be restricted to some building/improvements to start with.

The Earth-Moon region would include

• Earth
• Moon
• Lagrange Points L4 and L5. Great places for big stations as the orbit is stable requiring little or no corrections. You can even go in orbit around these "empty" bits of space like that solar satellite does at one of the Sun-Earth L 4/5 points.
• Earth Orbit with three zones - low (communication, space tourism and old folks homes), geosynchronous (communication, science) and high (gateway to the stars)
• Lunar orbit - low only(?)

Too many battles in any of the Earth Orbit zones would leave so much junk that it would close off Earth from space completely until cleaned up.

 

[Faustmouse]

Lagrange Points work a little bit different. They are not the only points that allow a stable orbit. What makes them special is that you could put spacecraft there and they stay on an orbit that is higher or lower but still maintain the same orbital velocity. Stable orbits are everything above a certain altitude so that drag isn't much of an issue.

Also, space battles would be cool, but having two ships meeting up in space is actually quite tricky. It would also be way more economically to shoot down enemy space ships with missiles or even lasers that to put your own battleship into orbit.

 

[Nevets_]

For adding resources to the moon have you considered asteroid capture? There is alot of iron and carbon in asteroids, and with recent advances in telescopes there have been alot of small asteroids discovered in and around Earth orbit. It wouldn't be too expensive to send a small probe to latch onto one and use solar sails and/or a small ion engine to slingshot it around Earth and have the Moon capture it. Then it could be cut up in orbit by a few drones and small pieces could be de-orbited and soft land a few dozen kilometers away from the base.

Since most of the expense would be the initial rocket launch it would be a way for Earth to send non-native raw materials to the Moon without having to expend tons of rocket fuel.

 

[Faustmouse]

asteroids are MASSIVE compared to normal spacecraft. They weight easily 100s or 1000s of tons. And most of them are beyond the orbit of mars, at which the solar energy is pretty low. Solar Sails and Ion engines (unless driven by beamed power) need lots of energy to actually work. And their thrust is TINY, so to change the asteroids velocity enough it would take you ages, if possible at all. I think it would be much cheaper to send a robot there, mine everything on site and then only bring back the materials.

I think we have two techs; Asteroid mining and Asteroid Extraction, which are these both ways of getting the stuff.

Damn I really sound like a buzzkill here

 

[Nevets_]

There are many smaller asteroids much closer to Earth than the ones in the asteroid belt, we just haven't been able to see them until recently. And you wouldn't need to adjust their orbit much to get them to encounter a gravity well that can kick them into a different orbit. It would take years to plan & execute over multiple orbits around the sun, but it's a low cost option compared to shipping iron & carbon to the Moon on a fleet of Saturn V's.

The problem with using algae for food & other things is it's a closed system. Every kilo of plastic you make is one less kilo of food to eat, which is one less kilo of CO2 & solid/liquid waste you can turn into fertilizer, and so on. So anything you can't mine out of the Moon's crust has to be shipped in from somewhere else. Civ4 doesn't do a good job with quantities, so I think anything that provides a resource from off world should have a very high and on-going maintenance cost. Food is the biggest problem, on Earth when we want to increase the food in the system we turn the nearly limitless nitrogen in the air into fertilizer, and grow new plants in soil where other less edible plants were already growing.

So it's okay that Civ4 food seems to come from nowhere, on the Moon building a greenhouse means you have to import a large load of water, nitrogen, carbon, and other things not already present. Maybe the earlier terraforming units should be built on Earth, and consumed upon use. That way in order to grow your colony by increasing the food supply you have to keep sending deliveries from the Earth.

 

[Faustmouse]

Water is found on the moon; as ice in some craters near the poles, but most importantly as crystal water in minerals. So this could be extracted.

The problem is carbon. I messed up here and always assumed that there was CO2 Ice on the moon; probably because Hydro listed all the extra terrestial resources we have and named it. But there isn't any, which is pretty annoying . So far, I have a Hydrophonics Farm building, and later a Greenhouse Complex. The Complex requires CO2 Ice. But since you can't find it on the moon I have to come up with something different. It should be ok for the small Farm to assume that all the carbon is brought there from earth since back then it is a closed cycle with no plastics being produced. But when you go big you have to have a a carbon source. You are right, asteroids would be a possibility. But sot landing them requires some energy aswell; and also quite high thrust (oders of magnitute more than Solar Sails or Ion Engines could produce). And then I think it would be actually cheaper to send it directly from earth.
The solar wind also contains carbon; but we are speaking of only a few atoms per m³ here. The crust only contains it in trace elements.

I have to read about that tomorrow...

 

[Faustmouse]

Since V36 is released now, am I allowed to make the adjustments to buildings and units that I posted on the last page? Some can be made in in main mod, as they are basically just overlooked requirements. The rest I'll make modular, so the Lunar Colonization Mod stays fully modular too.

Then there are some Tech adjustments I want to make, basically just to spread out things a little more. Are there plans to redo the TH and the Galactic era tech trees in the not-so-far future (before V37)?
Otherwise what I'd change is:

Lunar Manufacturing: Requires Lunar Colonization AND Automated Robotics (instead of Powered Exoskeleton)

Lunar Tourism: Requires Lunar Colonization AND Mega Corporations (instead of only Lunar Colonization). Also, it leads to some techs, including Mega Corporations; but I'd just remove Mega Corporations from the techs it leads to.



Regarding the issue with Carbon Dioxide, I think one solution could be mining carbon from P-Type asteroids. These are plentiful in the out asteroid belt, around three times the distance between Earth and Sun away from earth. Asteroid Mining (tech) is before Lunar Colonization, so this could be an option. However, since you can't produce Space Craft and / or Rocket Fuel on the moon by then, it is probably just as economic to launch carbon from earth to the moon...

I'm currently thinking of something like this:

- Algae Farm and Hydroponics use carbon from the original Base improvement
- Greenhouse Complexes would require a Carbon Storage, which is a building only buildable by the Supply Ship, which has to be send from earth.
- Later buildings, like a vertical farm and bigger projects, all the way up to Lunar Terraforming, would require an Asteroid Mining Base on the moon.

What do you think?

 

[Yudishtira]

Since V36 is released now, am I allowed to make the adjustments to buildings and units that I posted on the last page?

Of course you are!

Don't make my mistake of always asking before you do something. It's far easier to get forgiveness than permission, don't you know..

 

[JosEPh_II]

@Faustmouse,
I don't se any reason not too. Unless DH has said no or wait for some reason. But I don't recall him posting anything of that nature.

Ppl are clamoring for more content for TH and Galactic Eras.

JosEPh

 

[Faustmouse]

Ok